Essays on Russian Literature

An anthology of Solzhenitsyn’s literary criticism, reflecting his own, idiosyncratic, defamiliarizing take on familiar works, genres, and styles.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was perhaps the foremost moral witness to Soviet totalitarianism, and the last great representative of the 19th-century Russian ethical tradition. This volume is an anthology of Solzhenitsyn’s literary criticism, engaging with the Russian canon across decades and centuries, from Lermontov and Chekhov to Akhmatova and Brodsky....